Electronic systems and circuits have made a significant contribution towards the advancement of modern society and are utilized in a number of applications to achieve advantageous results. Numerous electronic technologies such as digital computers, calculators, audio devices, video equipment, and telephone systems have facilitated increased productivity and reduced costs in analyzing and communicating data in most areas of business, science, education and entertainment. Electronic systems providing these advantageous results often include integrated circuits. It is desirable to utilize integrated circuits with very high reliability characteristics to prevent erroneous results. However, designing and building integrated circuits with diverse functionality and performance characteristics is challenging. Additionally, the manufacturing process to build the integrated circuits is highly complex and resource intensive.
Manufacturing integrated circuits is an expensive, resource intensive activity, in which numerous computational components are included in a single integrated circuit unit. The computational components are usually required to be capable of performing a variety of tasks with very high reliability. Various applications often require different performance levels and functionality. Traditionally, each die is fabricated with a predetermined quantity of properly performing components providing set functionality. However, providing appropriate and efficient functionality at acceptable reliability is often difficult. For example, many traditional approaches require that there be few or no defective components included in the integrated circuit.
Conventionally, integrated circuits are manufactured in wafers comprising a number of die, with each die comprising an integrated circuit having numerous functional components. The number of die that are functionally acceptable from a given wafer is referred to as the yield from the wafer. It is desirable to maintain relatively high yields in order to eliminate waste, save cost and speed-up the effective manufacturing time for a given number of die. Yields for wafers with high performance die with a large number of components can be very low.
One method used by memory chip makers for mitigating the impact of the occurrence of defective components within an integrated circuit die is to produce the die with more components, e.g. memory cells, than required. If there is a defective component the defective component is disconnected and one of the “surplus” components is utilized. This approach usually results in considerable waste of precious die area and resources on fabricating components that remain “surplus” even after replacing defective components. Such surplus components do not contribute to functionality and/or operational productivity. A significant number of die end up having numerous “surplus” components with perfectly good operational capabilities that are not utilized.
Another traditional attempt at addressing defective components is to remove functional capability if one functional component associated with a particular function is defective. For example, if a floating point acceleration component of a processor is defective, the floating point acceleration functionality is removed or disabled using conventional repair techniques, and the processor becomes a non-floating point acceleration processor. In addition, the end result is a usable integrated circuit with limited capability and that does not provide a full range of functionality (e.g., not able to perform floating point operations).